Kuhle Wampe, or To Whom Belongs the World?

This explicitly socialist Weimar-era masterpiece, scripted by Bertolt Brecht and realised as an innovative hybrid of fiction and documentary, is the story of a working-class family’s bare survival in 1930s Berlin. Kuhle Wampe takes in subjects such as mass unemployment, workers’ rights and sexual politics. Already censored in 1932 for raising controversial issues, the film was banned by the Nazis for promoting ‘communist tendencies’.